Monthly Archives: April 2014

8 April!!!!!! After seeing the british teledrama Margaret and reading and viewing reports and commentaries on Margaret Thatcher’s passing A YEAR AGO, it’s my turn to write this résumé.

Geofrery Howe, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, John Major, Neil Kinnock, Paddy Ashdown are some of the names that popped up immediately when I learnt of her death. Having grown up in colonial Hong Kong and spending my very first year living away from my home town for post-secondary education in Liverpool, I watched on TV many of the parliamentary debates she had as prime minister as well as her then very dramatic ouster.

Paddy Ashdown, leader of Liberal Democrats 1988-1999, was very polite in his tribute. Nevertheless he highlighted her liberalisation of markets, her stripping down the barriers to business and her lowering taxation
had resulted in not greater prosperity for all but tonear ruin and disgusting climate of greed of the few.

He added the freedom advanced in the Thatcher years were “strangely partial” since it was mainly “economic freedom” of a few. On the other hand, Thatcher didn’t care much about political freedom of gays, people of Scotland or women

It was an unmitigated disaster for Britain because, if you recall, it commenced with a series of Budget changes and use of interest rates which, combined with the fact that oil was monumentally coming on stream, pushed the price of the pound out of sight and succeeded in inflicting devastating harm on the productive base of Britain.

And the end result was not modernisation, it was ­devastation.

Finally, more salt on the wound: Totally absent in any Western media coverage, her encounter of a bigger beast called Deng Xiao Ping in Beijing, China in 1984 concerning the future of Hong Kong definitely occupied her mind and caused the infamous “kowtow”. But given her stand on Falkland Islands and Pinochet just marked the slow decline of an empire which could only look back to the past.

Rest in peace, Lady Thatcher. Apart from being the first female head of state of a G8 country, you also did the world a lot of damage. Unfortunately, even though I don’t wish for another Reagan or Thatcher or Mulroney, their incarnations will certainly pop out again and wreak havoc. Case in point? Manuel Valls, the new Bacelona-born French Prime Minister who once said the name “Parti Socialiste” and its policies are dated. Hold your breath people!